By Dan Baldwin, Editor
951-251-5155 email
When I was interviewing Matt Coffy the other day on the topic of helping enterprise customers migrate away from Blackberry, we got into an intersting discussion about how half of his business had switched from selling telecom mobility solutions to selling "Marketing-as-a-Service".
Since I'm a telecom agent myself that has gotten into the business of selling marketing to other businesses Matt and I thought it would be interesting to interview him about his evolution for the benefit of TA's membership.
If you're looking to add $1,500 per month customers to your business base, please listen to or read the following interview. If you're interested in learning more about how you can add "Marketing-as-a-Service" to your solution set, contact
If there's enough interest Matt and I talked about recording some "this is how you sell Marketing-as-a-Service" web videos.
Following are the questions I ask Matt in the interview:
1. Matt, please give us a quick review of your telecom sales background.
2. What got you interested in SEO marketing initially.
3. How did you get involved in helping your telecom customers with their marketing?
4. Do you see a symbiotic relationship between telecom consulting and marketing consulting?
5. What are the opportunities for other telecom agents to follow in your footsteps?
6. What are the individual fundamentals that they would have to master to be successful?
7. What are you interested in doing to help them get started?
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Dan Baldwin: Business end-users primarily work with Telecom agents and channel partners because they need help contracting for technology services. They buy technology services because up-to-date technology services help the customer's business either save money or make money.
Another technology area that many business owners need help in is marketing. Website blogs, e-mail, newsletters, SEO search and general optimizations, link backs, landing pages. Everything to do with modern marketing on the web seems confusing to most small business owners who are only too glad to contract the web marketing out if they can find someone who actually knows what he or she is doing.
Today we are speaking with Matt Coffy, the owner of Slash Wireless and Coffy Group. Matt is the sort of technology marketing guru that business owners are looking to subcontract with. The reason we are speaking with Matt is he is also a successful Telecom agent that has added SEO marketing services to his customer solution set.
Matt, thanks for talking to us today.
Matt Coffy: Thanks very much for having me.
DB: Question #1. Can you please give us a quick review of your Telecom sales background?
MC: Well, that's a question that goes back many moons. I started off back in the days of selling 800 number services, and AT&T ready lines if people can remember that phrase, back in the wee 90s or late 80s when there was really a push to try and get people to move themselves into having 800 numbers and so forth.
It wasn't that popular. 888 had just come out, so we started to sell a lot of that stuff, and eventually that migrated into reselling Sprint, and reselling AT&T SDN, and of course the cstp2’s, and going through that whole phase of going up through selling per minute rates that were starting in the mid 20s and all the way down to the teens, and then 10s, and then obviously everything sort of moved and migrated into a different collateral services with data and voice being combined.
2:12 But through that period of time, if you're asking for a background I sort of went from the shift of selling voice services through some of the more prominent resellers of the day, through to working with some of the first voice over IP companies.
In fact, I was the first one to jump on the voice over IP bandwagon back in the late 90s, and jumped into a company called VocalTec which I learned there how to work on setting up gateways for carriers and so forth, and building the bridges between analog and voice over IP, and it was actually SIP. Then I eventually ended up then joining Sprint for a while for about 6 or 7 years and ran their channels for the Northeast on the wireless side.
So I have a long background of Telecom, and also a pretty significant level of experience in the wireless side. I have a good understanding of both sides of the coin, and it helps in understanding, especially from the agent world, where people are and what they are selling today.
DB: Question #2. How did you make this segway, what got you interested into search and general optimization on SEO marketing initially?
MC: Good segway, I have always had an interest in HTML and websites ever since the real internet really caught on which was in the last 90s. I always would do newsletters for my family, and I would make my own websites, and I was pretty good at it. It was just an interest of mine, and as time sort of got on through the mid 2000s, I ended up being sort of the web guy for the companies that I worked with, either channel partners or with a company that I worked for.
4:12 In fact, my last functional position when I was at ControlPoint now Tangoe, I built the website, I did the SEO for them, and it turned out to be something that I found a good interest in, and that sort of carried over in my today world where I'm basically working with a lot of clients from a lot of different industries helping them understand this market, helping them understand I think really the wheat from the chaff that I think are causing some of the conundrum in the market space where people are spending a lot of money and not getting results, and I try and make that equation go the other direction, which is not to spend a lot of money but to get a lot of results.
DB: Question #3. How did you get started helping your Telecom customers with their marketing? Did you just naturally drift into, “What are you doing on the web?”
MC: I think when people start to have a conversation and you start to talk about your background, and where you came from, and you have both sides of the fence covered, and you understand the gamut, and SEO is such a large topic and I think it leads itself to other pieces.
I think there are some missed numbers out there for most folks about what SEO really consists of, and obviously this is probably a discussion that could last for an hour about where the market is for SEO and what pieces of it are available to work into someone's marketing strategy, but we are working with clients that are of the same ilk. Telecom, or people with Telecom background, or wireless background, or customer premise equipment.
5:53 I know that talk, I know the speak, I know the pitch, and what we call in the industry keywords to use that as the SEO strategies, whether it's a marketing strategy that is going to be an on-page SEO or an off-page SEO strategy, or a real aggressive push into marketing and link building.
All of these pieces tie back together with my knowledge base of the space so that I'm sort of an industry expert on both sides of the fence, and that's why I think that's where it came from if you're asking me where starting to help companies in the space of this industry get started in the marketing tactics.
DB: With going back to the business end-user that seems to be lost with this technology and marketing and the SEO, are you basically saying look, it used to be the yellow pages make your phone ring, now it has to be the web. I'm going to show you how to use the web and SEO to make your phone ring? Is the pitch as simple as that for them?
MC: It is and it isn't. I think the reality is that SEO is one component of a marketing strategy. When I talk to my clients, we try and leverage all the aspects of what's really in demand in the market space, and what's really effective, and that includes Pay-per-click and pay for Google ads, and that includes social media management, reputation management and conversion optimization.
Honestly, the list goes on 10 deep. But, what we really find out is that we are trying to help clients become understanding of what they are paying for, and what they are going to get results for. There is pretty much a little known secret here, and I think that this is where the misnomer comes from. There isn't any really magic to this world of SEO and on-line marketing.
It's all labor, and it basically comes down to how much you pay for that labor, and how well you distribute that labor.
The reality is that a lot of people spend money with a lot of the pedestrian-style marketing, companies that are out there that were the typical yellow pages of the day who are now selling on-line marketing, and what I'm finding in most of the cases that I come across is that there are just a lot of ways to spend in those spaces where there is a lot of overhead in these companies and they charge a lot.
8:19 Where a guy like myself has expertise in not only the space, the industry that relates to the Telecom agents or that ilk, but also relates to the expertise of marketing this industry correctly and using the best methodologies at the lowest cost so that your return investment is a lot better off at the end of the day.
DB: So it does go back a little bit to the old days where you and I were selling AT&T SDN, we're talking to the customers and saying look, you're paying AT&T. AT&T has a whole lot of overhead, and then you're making phone calls. You can switch over to this other service and you'll still be making phone calls, and still have the exact same quality, maybe even the exact same network, but you're not paying for AT&T's overhead.
Is that how you're kind of pitching it, where I have the expertise to do all the individual marketing piece parts, but you don't have the huge overhead, and you are going to save a lot of money where right now they might be paying a larger marketing company who has a large overhead, is that what it's all about?
MC: Yeah, that’s one, and it's interesting. I've never had it put that way before, but I mean if you look at AT&T, and you look at Google, I mean back in the day that's really all there was. At the end of the day you're paying Google to get listed somehow, someway, whether you're doing it by paying them directly through Pay-per-click ads, or you're paying through the labor of getting yourself organically listed, there is a cost in doing that.
The better you get the ROI figured out on how to get yourself listed to the top of the list as I might say, on the first page is sort of where is where you have to be these days, that's really the ROI.
10:08 What is the cost to be on the first page from my keywords, from my industry. If I interconnect and I have certain keywords that I want to go after, and I'm selling certain types of products, how am I getting listed in my local area for that search query to come in and have me get found. And I think that that strategy is really what SEO and the general consensus of how to market is based on, is how to get onto that first page and how to be of relative value when you're found.
Of course, you have to have a website that is going to convert, or you have to have a conversion strategy from the landing page strategy once you do get found that does convert, but you've got to get there first.
DB: Question #4. What is the symbiotic relationship between Telecom consulting and marketing consulting? And what I just heard you say is with Telecom consulting, you're achieving a goal. People can either make phone calls or download files, and this is how much you used to pay, and this is how much you are paying now.
With marketing consulting you can count clicks, you can count conversions, you can count phone calls, and this is how much you used to pay, and this is how much you are paying, so it's really almost the same?
MC: Yeah, and I think that's why I think there is a good correlation for people who are in the business of typically running an operation that is used to getting residuals. If you think about it, if you're selling a T-1, if you’re selling data, you're selling some sort of product that has a monthly recurring residual to it, it's the same thing in the marketing world.
My clients are typically on, they're paying $1,000 a month or whatever to have me be their outsourced marketing person. I'm getting $1,000 a month residual, although obviously I have costs behind that, but the concept is that I'm billing a client monthly, and they're not going anywhere. They're staying, unless I'm getting picked off by someone who is better, faster, stronger and cheaper. I'm basically there for the long haul, and I've got that relationship.
Now, these relationships are typically with the owners, or someone within the organization that is pretty high up. And the Telecom agents pretty much have those relationships, so it's almost as if you're selling the toaster, you're selling the oven, you're selling the refrigerator and you’re selling the toast.
12:35 I think the concept of now that you've got a relationship with the customer, here's another product that you can bring in, add value, add stickiness, and also this is the difference, if you do this right, you're actually making a lot of money for your client. So the clients that we pick up and use our services, we're taking their typically either mismanaged marketing strategy or low-managed marketing strategy to a much higher level.
They're getting conversions of customers who are coming in to their website, they’re converting from eyeball to a phone call, and they're getting their cash register to ring. And at the end of the day, going to a customer and saying hey, we saved you money on your marketing strategy is one thing, but telling a customer hey, we improved your on-line results by 400% is a whole other different ball of wax.
That's the big difference here, is that when you come in with a strategy that is effective, now you've got a client for life because they don't want to go anywhere. It's just like an IT provider, how many people have changed their IT provider because they are scared to death that they are going to have some awful results?
The same thing with marketing, and I think the reality is that this market is absolutely right right now, and it will be for the next 2 or 3 years for a lot of the folks who have these relationships to open up this bridge before people sort of get overwhelmed.
I think that's what happened in the old days. Remember back in the mid 90s when it sort of got to a very difficult point where people were just sort of hanging up the phone. Right now people are listening because they want to, and I meant to correlate that back to the long distance sales of the mid 90s, but what I want to do is correlate it back to the fact that people are listening, and there is an opportunity here, especially with the rise in social media and how it plays into businesses hands of try to investigate how to build a better mousetrap to bring the customers in.
14:35 DB: Now with Telecom agents currently, they are usually given the contract signed by the owner, and they may or may not have gone through the IT manager to get to the owner. The owner wants to try and figure out well, do I get rid of the IT manager or whatever, and that's a whole long story, but with marketing and selling marketing, obviously the owner is probably going to sign off on it, but how are you getting to the owner? Is there another gateway or doorway person? Or do you just seek out the owner?
MC: I think most of my relationships have been channel-based. I've been brought into a lot of opportunities. Typically what happens is that someone will find out from someone else that hey, this guy did a great job, our numbers have gone sky-high and you've got to talk to this guy.
A lot of my actual relationships have been pushed from a referral basis, but when I'm talking directly to the owners of a business, we're talking about really educating the owner. A lot of the folks that are out there, small businesses, mid-size businesses, have not had the time to keep up with any of the on-line marketing strategies that are out there, and the stuff changes so much dramatically and you have to keep up with it. There is no way around it. It's not like a static environment.
So they want to be educated on it, and they do want to be up to speed with what's relevant for their industry, what's relevant for their tactics and what they should be employing. Again, I go back to what I originally said which was there are a lot of pedestrian-style marketing companies out there, the Yellow Pages, ReachLocal, and a whole bunch of guys that are out there who are asking for thousands and thousands of dollars, and I think the owners scratch their head after a while and say am I really getting results? Or am I just getting numbers?
So when we talk to people and we're having these discussions, it's not more or less I think a discussion of who do I speak to in the organization, it's more about what is the your understanding of this and do you recognize what you're paying for?
Because that's the biggest challenge that I run into is that most of the owners and folks that are involved in making decisions a lot of times don't have any idea what they're spending the money on, and once they understand that, and you get that through, it's not even a sale, it's more of a process of okay, what's the next step? How do we get this either fixed or put into a better position where we can get a better ROI and turn our marketing strategy into something that is going to be useful as opposed to just a cost?
17:16 DB: With Telecom, a lot of the agents are looking for multi-location, law firms, CPA firms, anything they can connect multiple offices, put in an Ethernet or an MPLS and put a voice on top, what are the industry types, or what are the verticals that are most ready to spend $1,000 a month or whatever it is for outsourced marketing? What verticals are you having the most success in?
MC: I would say a lot of the verticals that we are engaged in are service related. It actually follows the same sort of path. Obviously lawyers would be a part of the world that is extremely competitive. A lot of healthcare professionals, I've got tons of those. I've got a lot of retail outlets that are selling retail products.
I'm engaged with folks across the country in different verticals, but I think really if you looked at the way that people approach this. If there's a competitive market space, especially if it is a local competitive market space, you are going to have to put your foot into the water here and get engaged with an on-line strategy because today, as you mentioned before, there really are no yellow pages anymore. There is nobody looking for stuff in a book. They are going on-line, they're typing in 4 or 5 words, and if you're not popping up well you're just not getting the business.
And, the reality is that it is just going to get stronger, and the way that people make their decisions are going to be based on their peers. So they are going to be looking at reviews, and they're going to be looking at their social demographics of other people who have done business with this company, and if you've got those things aligned and these verticals, then you're going to be much better ahead.
I think that what I've found is that most people who we get engaged with want to try and explore different ways of utilizing activities on the net. We just saw a Groupon, which is a big on-line coupon solution just go public and make how many hideous amounts of millions of dollars in their public offering, but that's just another example of what people are doing to get themselves positioned properly, and these service-oriented companies are a lot of the businesses that I work with because they're in that fight. They're in that fight to beat the other local guy to the top of the list.
19:52 DB: And the customers that you're finding a sweet spot with, do they have existing marketing employees? Or is it still the owner trying to figure out where he is going to place his marketing money, and he doesn't have an employee that is in charge of the marketing?
MC: That's a really, really deep question. It all depends. I will give you 3 examples, and then we can tie this back into like an end summary.
The first example is they have a marketing person, and that marketing person is in charge of all sorts of marketing. They may be in charge of paper, print, on-line and trade shows. They might have a whole roster of things they want to do, and keeping up with just the on-line piece is a job in itself.
If you look at the cost of putting someone in charge of just on-line for a small mid-size business, lets just say an average value of somewhere between $50,000, is it worth it to have that person come aboard? Or is it just better served to have someone to outsource it to and spend a couple thousand bucks a month on someone to just do it for you who has a lot of experience, and has knowledge base, and can quickly move and change with the industry. That's the first example.
The second example, which is the most common that I find, is business owners that I deal with that I just sort of have been told by some company somewhere and have tried to do it themselves, not necessarily trying to do it themselves meaning that they put the ads in themselves, but they've tried to basically work with one of these, again I call them pedestrian-style but you can just say the on-line marketing guys in general, and have some mixed results and they've gone down the path of they've done some advertising, but it's been okay. Those are the ones I love the most because I can come in and explain what they're paying for and really show them a true ROI, and a true path of better strategy.
The last one are the folks who haven't done anything, and I run into these people all the time. They've been traditionally doing print advertising, they've done their catalogues, and now they're starting to think okay, it's my turn to get into this business and so they come to me with sort of an open book and say okay, show me what I need to do.
So those are the 3, and the summary of this is that there are all sorts of types, especially in the mid range market when you're talking about people who are willing to spend between $1,000 to $5,000 on their marketing strategy on-line, there are all types. But they all seem to need help, and that again ranges from some expert Pay-per-click management, SEO (search engine optimization) strategies, SEM (search engine marketing), mobile web sites, conversion optimization, again the list goes deep
23:00 I haven't found anybody who has said oh yeah, we have everything covered, because they really don't, and that's what it comes down to that if you can provide value, you're going to be a partner hopefully for a long time with these customers, because you're driving what I consider the wedge into that client to say listen, I know a lot of this stuff, I eat it every day. Every morning I'm up spending an hour figuring out the best way to do this for my clients. I don't know if anybody in your organization is doing that, or if you're doing it, or if these folks who are pedestrian marketers really care, because they are just in it for the sale.
That summary is more about letting yourself become the trusted adviser and adding that value, and whether you do it by learning it yourself as a Telecom agent, and certainly that's a big ball to handle, or using someone like myself to go out and address this market is one way to approach this.
DB: That takes us into our closing question. Certainly there are going to be a lot of channel partners and Telecom agents that like the way this sounds. They certainly know they have business owners they can talk to.
Question #5. What are the individual fundamentals they would have to master to be successful? How do they follow in your footsteps, and how is it that Coffy Group can help them get started?
MC: That's a great question. I'm glad that you asked that whole strategy of how do you do this. Needless to say, I think what I've done is amassed a great collection of team members, whether they are virtual or on site, to do pieces of this who are experts in their own right within their framework of each individual aspect of the business.
That itself is really the business. It's knowing the people, it's knowing the players, it's knowing the cadences to work with them. Their timing, their pricing, their ability to deliver, all of these pieces whether it's building a better web site to trap traffic better by conversion optimization, or having the best guy who does link building for SEO who can drive traffic back to your site, or even to the point of having a virtual assistant that can do a lot of the day-to-day grunt work that just needs to be done.
25:14 All of these things I have accomplished. So if you want to follow those footsteps, you are going to have to find these people, and you are going to have to find them, and line them up, and become their ally.
It is a gigantic puzzle that I've amassed over the period of the last couple of years where I've come to the conclusion that there are people who do these things quite well, and if you can put them all together into a format and sell that as a service, meaning that I'm sort of the master of all the projects going on, and it's tied into what I call a virtual project solution which is I think everybody should know about, if you haven't heard of 37 signals you may want to look at that web site, 37signals.com, but that is sort of where everything starts.
Everything is based on a project management tool, everything is timed out, scheduled that goes along with a client's requirements and reports are delivered, and an analysis is done, and feedback is given and put back into the analysis, and put back into the schedule, and it just continues on a monthly basis.
So those are things I've built, and to have someone follow in those footsteps, you just have to learn each individual piece, and you have to understand how SEO works, what are the best practices. How do you build an ad structure? What do you do when you're doing a Pay-per-click campaign to improve the overall throughput of the ad structure for costs and return on investments, and get that into a comparable solution next to the next competitor and lower your costs according to what the keywords are, ect etc..
Again, these pieces go on and on forever, but to learn this you spend probably -- like I said, I spend an hour a day just trying to keep up with the Jones'. I think the reality is that for a Telecom agent to get this amassed into their head, they are going to have to spend a majority of their time learning, and then figuring out the people who to work with.
27:26 Or, on the flip side, you work with someone like myself who can provide these services to the client base, and then you end up getting residual based on what the spend of the client is, just like you do with a T1 or with a premise or voice over IP solution. That's what I do with my agents and resellers.
DB: This is Dan Baldwin. We've been talking to Matt Coffy. He is a Telecom agent with Slash Wireless, and he is also an SEO marketing guru helping small and medium-sized businesses as their outsource marketing provider.
Matt, what's the best way for people to get a hold of you and follow up on some interest?
MC: You can always e-mail me at info@coffy.com, or you can go to the web site coffy.com. I'm always willing to take phone calls and answer questions. You can call me directly at 201-546-5020.
DB: Thanks a lot, Matt. We appreciate your time today.
MC: It was a pleasure.
Dan & Matt,
Great interview. Very interesting. Do you have a SMS marketing strategy to package with SEO? We represent the largest international SMS company in the world. We have a program that provides residuals to agents selling SMS sevices.
Please feel free to give me a call to discuss.
Thanks!!!
Larry Ramsey
VP, Global Business Development
XPEC Global Consortium
Direct: 530.238.9702
email: lramsey@xpecinc.com
www.xpecinc.com
Posted by: Larry Ramsey | 12/06/2011 at 03:34 PM